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Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Teach me all that I must do

Random connection for the day (with an unnecessarily long prelude).

First, the back story: the husband and I watched (the vampire television series created by Joss Whedon) Angel together in syndication when we were first married. It came on at a convenient time (dinner-ish, I think), and I had told him how much I had liked (the preceding vampire slayer series, also created by Whedon) Buffy and how fabulous I thought the first little bit of Angel was. I'd missed most of the seasons after the first one, so it was great for us to watch the rest together. (Plus, broody star David Boreanaz was a local boy, the son of a Philly weatherman.) Unfortunately, neither of us knew at the time that Angel had been cancelled abruptly, so the disappointing ending to the last season was actually the incredibly more disappointing ending to the entire series. The husband was (and is--just ask!) very, very, very bitter about that (or don't ask, if you want us to stay friends).

However, he forgave me eventually, sort of, and later we watched Whedon's Firefly, another clever series killed before its time. This time around, however, Whedon finished things with a satisfying movie, Serenity, which we also enjoyed. By then, I had completely turned the husband into a fan of the Whedonverse, so much so that, even later still, when Whedon released Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a sort of mini musical made for the web, the husband was the first to hear about it, buy it, and watch it, all by himself. Soo, when Whedon's latest network show, Dollhouse, finally debuted, we were both watching on Hulu (and every once in a while in real time on Fox).

Cut to the present: when I was catching up on the last episode today, I noticed there were some web-exclusive clips which seemed intriguing, though I never watch these sorts of clips. (I'm interested in the episodes only, thank you.) But I clicked on one, in which Eliza Dushku, the star of Dollhouse, was talking with her new web guru (since apparently she's techno-phobic and had some contest to design her Myspace page...?). He was explaining something to her, and she sat down and cooed "Lead me, guide me, walk beside me," a line which will just seem clever(ish) to my non-Mormon readers but which will set off all sorts of recognition bells for the LDS crowd, these being the lyrics of a common children's song.

A little Googling later, and I discovered I was right: Dushku was raised LDS. Or, as several of the blogs/bios I read hilariously put it, she is "ethnically Mormon." (What does that even mean, people?) Of course, given that the show is all about wish fulfillment using often scantily clad "dolls" for hire, it's clear she's no longer practicing, but hey, as I've said before, we're everywhere!!!